Exclusive cover reveal: ‘The Last Wolf’ by Maria Vale

Exclusive cover reveal: ‘The Last Wolf’ by Maria Vale

Maria Vale joins us to unveil the cover of her fantasy/paranormal romance The Last Wolf (The Legend of All Wolves book one), arriving Feb. 6. She’s also sharing her thoughts about the werewolves in her series and the cover’s design.

First, about the book:

For three days out of thirty, when the moon is full and her law is iron, the Great North Pack must be wild.

If she returns to her Pack, the stranger will die.

But if she stays…

Silver Nilsdottir is at the bottom of her Pack’s social order, with little chance for a decent mate and a better life. Until the day a stranger stumbles into their territory, wounded and beaten, and Silver decides to risk everything on Tiberius Leveraux. But Tiberius isn’t all he seems, and in the fragile balance of the Pack and wild, he may tip the destiny of all wolves…

Maria: What is it about werewolves?

I know there are plenty of other shifter romances, from bears to cuttlefish, but wolves still rule them all. Maybe it’s because we have seen them as the ultimate outliers for so long. After all, the Anglo-Saxon word wearg means both felon and wolf, while wulfsheafod means wolf’s head or outlaw. Given that, it’s easy to imagine the delicious combination of controlled, civilized man and dangerous, lawless beast. They are men who sometimes give in to their bestial natures.

But the more I read about wolves, I wondered if that was really fair. Did that in some way play into the same tropes as wolves in fairy tales?

Instead, I reimagined a world in which these wolves were not dangerous and lawless, but vulnerable and sociable, with a strong sense of hierarchy. Supposing, in other words, they were more like real wolves.

I called them Pack, because when I asked them how they felt about being called werewolves, they snapped at me. We are not man-wolves, they said. Whatever else you may think of us, we are not human.

Unwilling to get into an argument with the 400 large wolves skittering around my brainpan, I conceded. The one thing that they conceded was that even though they were individually powerful, like real wolves, they were ultimately vulnerable.

For three days out of every 30, Pack are simply wolves. Self-aware wolves, because that makes for better fiction, but there is no magic. They cannot talk. They cannot stand up on two legs. It doesn’t take a silver bullet to kill them.

To make things worse, their transformation isn’t instantaneous. It’s slow, taking over half an hour for the largest wolf. And during that time, as their bodies reconfigure, they are blind and deaf and immobilized. During this in-between stage, one over-eager raccoon could kill them.

Having established this vulnerability, what would that mean for the world?

Well, they said, we definitely need a protected territory where we can be wild without constantly worrying about being trapped or hunted. We need shelter for when we are in skin. And we need a tight social structure to protect us and make sure our secrets are kept.

Because the history worked well, I imagined one threadbare Pack striking out from the dying forests of England in the mid-17th century to form the Great North Pack in the Adirondacks. They are understandably suspicious of outsiders and this makes them deeply conservative. So even 350 years after leaving Mercia, they still often speak the Old Tongue (it took me a while to recognize it as the English of Beowulf). They have a peculiarly wolf-centric take on Anglo-Saxon religion. And far from being lawless, they have a complex body of laws and traditions aimed at maintaining discipline at home and ignorance of their existence among humans.

Apparently, the first Alpha, recognizing that isolation wasn’t a long-term solution, forced her Pack to study us. To learn our language and our laws. The littlest wolves, the pups, are constantly wild and constantly underfoot, cared for and loved by the entire Pack. But as soon as they become juveniles, they must spend time in skin, learning how to eat with a fork, how to wear clothes, how to use words. In this Year of first Shoes, they take the first of many Human Behaviors classes.

Everyone agrees that it is a terrible, terrible time.

Then in their continued attempt to adapt to the ways of the apex predator, they go to law school. Not all of them, but enough to protect Homelands by means every human understands. Through secrecy and legal protections and accumulated money, the Great North struggles to hold the human world at arm’s length, but Shifters … that’s another matter.

Shifters clearly share a common ancestor with Pack, but whereas Shifters can be wolves, they never have to be. And given a choice between being at the top of the food chain or being a despised and hunted outlier, they have, not surprisingly, evolved to become more and more human. They are just as rapacious and self-involved as we are, but a whole lot stronger and with much better senses. They know that Packs exist and have long taken advantage of their frailty.

This is the conflict that confronts the hero, the half-Pack/half-Shifter Tiberius. Should he side with the part of him that is human and privileged or the part of him that is wild and vulnerable?

The part that he is just discovering with the help of the fierce and wild Silver.

And this is what Dawn Adams captured so brilliantly in this gorgeous cover. It is in the tender curve of Tiberius’ strength as he embraces not just Silver, his last wolf, but the whole of the wild.

About Maria

Maria Vale is a journalist who has worked for Publishers Weekly, Glamour magazine, Redbook, the Philadelphia Inquirer. She is a logophile and a bibliovore and a worrier about the world. Trained as a medievalist, she tries to shoehorn the language of Beowulf into things that don’t really need it. She currently lives in New York with her husband, two sons and a long line of dead plants. No one will let her have a pet.